How to Read a Novelist

John Freeman

John Freeman, author and editor of Granta magazine, has interviewed nearly every name in fiction and the literary world. In this collection Freeman has compiled the most insightful and fascinating of his interviews, essays and articles.

John Freeman is the former editor of Granta and the author of books including How to Read a Novelist. He is executive editor at the Literary Hub and teaches at the New School and New York University. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times and Paris Review, and has been translated into more than twenty languages.

‘Freeman’s interviews transcend the mechanics of the encounters and, beyond smart and knowledgeable, he’s the kind of interlocutor who asks a sideways question, then pays attention to the space and circumstance of the answer as much as to its words.’

Weekend Australian

‘John Freeman’s collection of interviews spans 56 giants of the literary world, nine years and an accumulated IQ reaching into the stratosphere.’

Sunday Star Times

‘Pure gold…Full of wit and wisdom; a buoy in the face of life’s inevitable swats.’

Insights Magazine

‘This book is billed as “the ultimate booklover’s book” and it’s true. This booklover was in a state approaching ecstasy reading about John Freeman’s conversations and intimacies (and occasional gaffes) with all the writers I have loved and wondered about.’

Courier Mail / Daily Telegraph

‘Bearing in mind that novelists must be the most self-aware profession to interrogate, Freeman here triumphs.’

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Extract fromHow to Read a Novelist

Excerpt from U and ME: The Hard Lessons of Idolising John Updike

I got lost on my way to the museum and arrived late. I discovered Updike waiting by the foyer, dressed in khaki slacks and a sports coat. Just over seventy years old, he had a full head of hair and the coiled physical presence of a man in good shape. We passed through a few galleries, Updike dispatching prose poems of appreciation with chummy good humour—as if surprised by how easily his mind created verbal felicitations with language. At some point I began to flag, however, because he turned to me and said, 'Is this enough? I mean, you look pretty tired. I understand you are coming from Vermont?'

I told him it was not Vermont, but Maine, and in response to his question about what I was doing up there said, 'I was getting divorced.' The interview came to a dead halt. Updike turned to me with real feeling, his ironic pose collapsing. 'I'm really sorry,' he said. He would not allow me to make light of my newly minted divorce, and said that he had gone through this once before too, which I knew, and that it was hell. His advice continued, briefly, but it was so surreal to hear him reference his private life that today I can hardly remember what he said.

Apparently, though, he remembered. When Terrorist, his most recent novel, approached publication, a newspaper asked me if I could once again speak to John Updike. I called his publisher and was put on a junket schedule, then bumped and bumped again. Finally I got through to his publicist. He switched from speakerphone to handset.

We got some mixed feedback from John on the last conversation, the publicist explained. My ripped jeans and two days' growth might have been noted, my mid-interview explosion of personal detail—which I remembered as more of a leak—had possibly made John feel uncomfortable. I had to understand, John was of the old school.

I didn't know what to say. At first I was hurt, embarrassed, but soon I became more circumspect. If I hadn't known before, I knew now: it was a breach of everyone's privacy when a reader turns to a writer, or a writer's books, for vicariously learned solutions to his own life problems. This is the fallacy behind every interview or biographical sketch, to tether a writer's life too literally to his work, or to insist that a novel function as a substitute for actually living through the mistakes a person must actually live through in order to learn how to properly, maybe even happily, survive.